WAYUT: Families feud

Survey says...indelible trauma!

When I was 14, my family and I attended what my grandfather called “Papa Day.” Papa Day took place once every summer, during which my grandfather invited all 14 of his children, their spouses, and 19 grandchildren to the country club (true white people shit, I know, I’m sorry) for a day of poolside fun and early evening barbecue.

I had a love-hate relationship with Papa Day. I loved the complimentary, striped towels that the cute, front desk boy handed us on our way in; I loved the chocolate milkshakes and curly fries the café served until 2pm, and I loved getting the chance to practice my corkscrew twirl off the diving board again and again and again.

I hated wearing a swimsuit in front of my tiny, blonde relatives. I hated chasing after my cousins, all older than me, predominantly boys, who mostly never laughed at my jokes. I hated the way my thighs and ass dug into the plastic of the lounge chair, pinching red marks into my already-dimpled skin and creating divots my aforementioned tiny aunts and girl cousins could spelunk in. The older I got, the more the vice-like discomfort outgrew the joy.

I tried to ignore the inescapable embarrassment looming over me that day, my last Papa Day, as I waded into the pool in a J. Crew one piece—ruched to hide any prepubescent problem areas. I tilted my face to the sun to catch what little rays my pale skin could when my cousin Jake swam up to me.

Jake is a year older than me, meaning he was, at the time, a very cool, rising sophomore in high school. I don’t remember if he had acne or braces, but I remember feeling jealous of the way his straight blonde hair swept over his forehead in a quintessential 2010s Bieber-cut—each golden strand glistening from the lemon juice his mom made him spray on his head to “bring out his natural highlights.”

Jake is the youngest of four brothers who tolerated me at best and made me want to slingshot myself into the sun at worst. Still, it didn’t stop me from trying to joke around with them, often with increasing desperation and to little avail. Any meek chuckle or wincing smile they threw my way was something I counted as a victory, another bandaid to slap over my pitiful, bleeding heart. I needed to be liked by them. I needed my family to like me.

So when Jake swam up to me, his gilded strands a halo on his head, I met him with a very chill, cool girl nod.

“Hey Jake,” I said.

“Hey Meg,” he said, “Why are you so fat?”

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Hot shame flooded through me. I picked at the ruching on my swimsuit. My mom told me in the store that the dark aubergine color suited my skin tone. I began treading away, my body desperate to create space between myself and this feeling. I wondered briefly if it was possible to drown myself.

I mumbled some response like, I don’t know or I just am, I guess, while my stomach twisted into a sailor’s knot.

Jake shrugged, one shoulder rising and falling.

“Okay,” he said, and swam away. I watched him climb out of the pool and do a cannonball off the diving board. I pictured ripping every strand of hair off his stupid head.

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As a kid, I imagined my extended family as a cluster of neural pathways—each holiday party buzzy with electric, booming laughter. Sentences from an aunt cut off by an uncle with a punchline to a childhood anecdote the nieces and nephews heard a hundred times and would clamber to hear a hundred more, our synapses fired with each pop of a wine cork pulled from their bottle. We were loud and vast and drank until we couldn’t drink anymore. We loved each other and got along and considered ourselves very special because of it. We didn’t fight, not really anyway, and we would say “we” as if we were an annoying couple who just got back from their honeymoon and not a 50-something mass of pasty Irish Catholics. We were separate until we weren’t. Everything clicked into place as each relative joined the party one by one and we were, finally, a singular unit. Able to breathe again. I watched my family move as an interconnected web, a wave rising and falling, together. To a lonely kid, it felt good to be told I was a part of something.

I couldn’t square, then, why I still felt so damn alone. I couldn’t explain why, at the family parties I claimed to love so much, I scrambled for escape routes, taking solace in an empty bedroom or basement. I didn’t have the words to express why it felt so good to listen to everyone having a good time instead of getting in the mix myself, and I concluded, early on, that something was very, very wrong with me.

The boys in my family laughed and rough-housed with each other. The older, cooler girls were so effortlessly small and blonde (or brunette with gorgeous honeyed highlights).

And I was too much. I cracked jokes my uncles and boy cousins didn’t respect. I ate in a way that caused my aunts to eye me up and down and ask me if I really needed that second cookie. I was not blonde and I didn’t get highlights until college. I was tall, and my body was wrong, and the things I said were wrong. In time, I learned it was better to smile, lips tight, and pull at my too-pilled sweater or run my fingers through my too-frizzy hair, and hope to wake up the next morning feeling less vaporous. I would never be a positive addition to the family unit, but I could stand aside while the better, more worthy candidates buzzed and crackled and enjoyed themselves. We loved each other and got along, after all.

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When I was in my early twenties, one of my older cousins, Matt, got married. In a note Matt and his wife wrote to me thanking me for my attendance, he scrawled, It’s been so lovely watching you grow from a shy girl into the confident young woman you are now.

“I’m not shy,” I said to my mom after the reception, throwing my hands in the air with an exasperated laugh. “I’ve never been shy!”

“Well, he sees you as shy,” she said.

And that’s always been the problem.

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I’ve considered, lately, how my family’s intertwining sense of identity has been a disservice to each of us—how the unspoken family mantra of We always get along has snuffed out so many opportunities for true intimacy. We’ve never loved each other enough to fight about the real stuff. I think we’ve always been too scared about what truths those disagreements would uncover—how the casual, callous misogyny, racism, fatphobia and homophobia older generations have tossed around in conversation stifled not only the identities of the grandkids, but our safety. (There are like, a hundred of us, for god’s sake. There’s no way I’m the only gay one.) Only a few years ago did I and several other of my female cousins all vocalize that one male cousin in particular had always been needlessly cruel to us. Even now, I find it difficult to discern who, outside of my immediate family, I can speak plainly with and who makes me feel like I’m still the “shy” little cousin.

I don’t claim to be the pastoral daughter/niece/cousin in all this. In the same way my family eyes me with uncertainty whenever I talk about New York or my three, straight, male roommates (Is she dating one of them? Or is she gay? Like, really one a them true-blue queers?) or, god forbid, my artistic pursuits, I, too, eye my family with curious hesitation. Family parties now feel like 5th grade French class: none of us have the language to go much further than Did you go to the library today? Yes, I went to the library, and I got a book. A book! My favorite color is green.

We’ve moved as a unit for so long; I spent the better part of two decades not knowing my family as individuals. When my lifelong friend attended my sister’s wedding as my plus one, he remarked, “I’ve never met a family so proud of being a family before.”

When I get the chance, I try to throw a wrench into the hivemind pride. On a trip with my mom, sister and aunts a few years ago, I spoke to one of my aunts about the difficulties her daughter experienced with fertility and, later, about how she and my uncle met one another. It was the longest conversation I’d ever had one-on-one with her. It’s one of my favorite family memories.

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This past weekend, I woke up to a message from an Instagram account I don’t follow, though one cursory glance informed me it was from Jake’s mom, Patricia. Patricia is well into her 60s now, a die-hard Trump supporter, and once told my mom to essentially go fuck herself in a reply-all email thread after my mom told the extended family that they couldn’t come to Christmas unless they were vaccinated.

Curiosity got the better of me, and I opened the message. It was a homophobic, trolling response to one of my Instagram stories I’d posted about kissing a girl. Like mother, like son. Both dickheads.

I’ll say it: I think it’s fine to not like members of your family if they fundamentally believe those or the ones you love shouldn’t exist. I think it’s fine to hate those guys and think they’re a bunch of idiots. I think it’s fine to not love them—that should be easier to write, but it still feels like pulling a thorny vine from my throat.

But the ones I do love? I will brave the(ir) discomfort with fighting to know them. I will work—clumsy and fumbling—to yank these thorny vines up by our rooted stomachs and untangle the darkened overgrowth we’ve watered to hide us from ourselves. I will continue to crack jokes to the dismay of my more curmudgeonly, sexist uncles (one did say I was funny at a cousin’s wedding recently…the rush was like no other).

I will try, beginner’s French conversation after beginner’s French conversation, to know them and choose to love them anyway. I believe we deserve the right to choose. I believe we can ask more for ourselves, this proverbial “We” we take so much pride in. I believe we can do the scary thing of disagreeing and hope there is enough love to remain when the dust settles.